AwakeEnergyScouter

I will absolutely not be participating in this phenomenon. Facts exist and they matter, period. You ignore them at your own peril. Pretending that things are one way (pravda) when they are plainly another (istina) is the root of the rot that always ruins whatever our (Swedish perspective) only remaining enemy to the east does. Just look at Karelia, and inversely the Baltic countries now compared to USSR times. If you want things to work in your country, citizens need to know what is actually happening in it and how things work on a nuts and bolts causal level, not what some high-level politician wants to be true or wants you to pretend to be the case so they can defraud your state. I can't control other people, but I will absolutely not pretend that the sky is green because it's inconvenient to someone else that it's blue. I don't care how out of touch or elitist that might seem to other people, for me that is a basic act of patriotism and cultural identity. I am of a people that doesn't operate on parallel political and factual truths. One of our defining cultural traits is that we operate on factual truth only. This might sound a little harsh, and in a sense it is but it's not directed towards you. I just grew up knowing that I would be the target of political propaganda and that a country that did not wish us well was trying to convince citizens that they should give up resistance so that they could take over our country and suck all the resources out of it too, like they already have the territory they control. I've thought about the importance of seeking and confirming truth for a very long time, in several political time periods and in different countries with and without political censorship and repression. In addition, I have a religious obligation to never give up trying to see reality as it is in order to help other people. If you give up truth and respect for the equal intrinsic value and dignity of each human being, it doesn't matter how slick your talk is, it's all going to go sideways in the end. Convincing other of something is all fine and good, but what's the point if you don't make sure to be right first?

Mine is cub-age as well, and I didn't think anyone would bring up current events/politics during this adventure until I realized with some shock that my child's probably entire class discusses US politics and their opinions of parties and individual politicians on the regular, including speculating or sharing who their parents voted for in the 2024 election. (Before the election, it was "was going to vote for".) Evidently we had done a good job of not voicing our political opinions in front of them (thinking as you did, that the time was later and that we ought to start somewhere nuanced and thoughtful), because they came from from a sleepover last year and asked us to vote for a particular candidate because they didn't know who we were going to vote for. The kids at the sleepover had made a pact to get their parents to vote for that candidate! The young age at which they did this really took me aback. But then again, at the Webelos-AOL overnight camp our pack attended last summer a Webelos yelled out "To elect Trump!" as an answer to the question "what do we have an election for this fall?" during that same adventure. The answer the staffer was looking for, was, of course, "president". I don't know if this is typical or unusual, but wanted to pass on the experience in case it's more in the common side. I know we definitely weren't discussing politics when I was their age. But since they seem to be, I wanted to prevent political shout-outs like the one we saw at camp. When it comes to reliable media, everyone has offered good observations already, but I wanted to add a general strategy for cross-checking and/or finding higher-quality reporting: public service media. It's never behind a paywall, and since the funding doesn't depend on advertising and the mission is explicitly to educate and inform their citizenry the quality is much higher than many private media these days. In Swedish public media, I regularly see reporting that forces politicians and civil servants to take action to fix problems, such as that 2/3 of the train delays in a certain region was due to the same five malfunctioning switches that had been due for exchange for years. Poof, those switches got exchanged real quick once that reporting was published because who wants to seem incompetent? If you only speak English, your options are more limited, but the BBC is excellent. France 24 also publishes news in English, as does Deutsche Welle. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also publish public service news in English. https://www.bbc.com/news https://www.france24.com/en/ https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/s-9097 https://www.cbc.ca/news https://www.abc.net.au/news https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world

I just scheduled the "talk with an elected official about whether they were elected using majority or plurality voting and why" requirement of My Community, and decided to add this to the invite. "Note about scouting and politics: The scouting movement is nonpolitical in that in our roles as scouts and scouters in uniform, we do not express support for any particular political candidate in any particular place. We are a civic movement that recognizes the inviolable human dignity of each human being, freedom of thought, religion, assembly, and expression; democracy, equal rights under the law for everyone, rule of law, and human rights. We encourage our members to take an active role in creating a harmonious society that is consistent with our value foundation, but also encourage each member to reach their own conclusion regarding which political candidates have the best suggestions for how to do that in the country in which they live, consistent with freedom of thought. Given that we have over 50 million members worldwide, our fellow scouts and scouters are almost guaranteed to be mixed political company, but actively voicing support for the importance of human dignity, civic freedoms, democracy, equal rights, rule of law, and human rights is not considered political as far as the scouting movement goes, even if they are contested in a country with a scouting organization." I also agree that advising youth on not getting their news from social media is a good idea. "I read it on the Internet so it must be true" is the new "I saw it on TV so it must be true". Being able to evaluate the source of information and knowing how to cross-check it is a key skill in an information society.

Ki ki so so!

I actually found it pretty easy, but I also have a professional background as a project manager as well as with running operations and quality control and went into the course clear on why I am a Scouting America leader and how that connects to my personal values and spiritual path. Defining the vision and writing some SMART goals to support it was just codifying my long-term to do list. Helpful to get the prompt, especially since we could sit down and coordinate - I could cut several things off my list because my CC is doing them instead. As always, I am fulfilling my vows, in the case of Scouting America the Mahayana stage vows being the most relevant. (Bodhisattva and Enlightened Society vows, so to liberate all sentient beings and to always stay in touch with the primordial nature of all sentient beings and build a society based on the view that all beings have indestructible dignity and intrinsic value) Meeting the dralas - in the case of scouting activities, the land spirits especially - is a key part of discovering sacredness and one's own primordial nature. Your face before your parents were born, as the Zen folks say. There's solid reasons for why BP used the outdoors as a feedback mechanism for development. So in order to connect youth with sacredness, themselves, and the land, our outdoor program needs to be well-executed and easy to operate for a rotation of leaders coming and going. Based on previous observations of what's worked well and what hasn't, combined with the need to continually welcome parents in as new leaders, I intend to lay the groundwork for a long-term sustainable outdoor program for our pack by: * Creating a veg-friendly pack cookbook with all the the "hooks" for the new cub scout program requirements that pertain to cooking - met someone at IOLS a few weeks ago who had the exact problem beyond my own that I wanted to solve, namely omni leader with vegan scout whose parents weren't that helpful or experienced with camp cooking so that was a win * Creating a field manual for running our hiking club, including the necessary modifications to meet all the new required hiking adventure requirements as well as provisions for at least occasionally completing the related ones like Math on the Trail and Tech on the Trail (currently I am running the whole thing, but will have to transition it to someone else during next scouting year or it will die when my cub crosses over) * Create a field manual for running our campouts that likewise delivers opportunities to earn all the Let's Camp adventures plus Outdoor Adventurer every campout, and is easily adaptable to complete other outdoor adventures (hiking, fishing, Into the Woods, Into the Wild, eating requirement for the personal fitness adventures, etc) that solidifies what parents and cubs appreciate the most about how we do campouts right now while also spreading the organizing burden as widely and fairly as possible * 5S our camping supplies to make it easy for an adult to make sure we have everything we need for every campout in a way that doesn't require tribal knowledge * Go recruit in five completely new places where we've never recruited before to get us out of our recruiting rut and reach people who may not have thought they'd be welcome in Scouting America and/or don't really know what we do We pack leaders spend so much of our mental energy on campouts on managing the physical that we don't always have the calm to model that connection to the sacred. We need to collectively just get a grip and sort it out so that we can have more transcendental moments with the grass, the touch of the wind, the kisses of the sun, the call of the water, all that. Ultimately, we need to maintain some degree of samadhi ourselves and raise windhorse fearlessly in order to offer our cubs what they need to develop, and we aren't doing that if we're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. May this be fruitful, may this be of benefit, may this be auspicious, my it be so 🙏🏼

The requirement isn't done, so the youth isn't due anything until it is. Therefore, there is no delay in receiving what is due because it isn't due yet. Downvote for explaining something factually and calmly? Noted. You're right, the Internet can be a hard mean place. That's why we scouts do better, right? May you also find happiness and contentment. I'm following swilliam's cue and sticking to my RL scouter friends for a while.

Take care of yourself. May you be well and happy, and may your scouts blossom into happy, healthy young adults as well.

As you can see, they were not. She was asking for help on manually marking off a partially completed requirement, that was the whole question.

Exactly! Adding to my satisfaction is that two of my fellow leaders went at the same time, so now we're working on improving how our unit runs at the same time. By the time our tickets are finished, we will have significantly improved operational efficiency and have incorporated all the new adventure requirements into the operations in a scalable, repeatable way. And now when we need something, we have contacts at council as well as other units. Much better situation to be volunteering from.

To me, the natural solution is for him to join the scout corps in Ecuador since that's where he lives now (https://scoutsecuador.org/) and then just come visit your troop whenever he's around as a social and networking visit. My troop had some foreign visitors like that, although mostly scouters. Some of my patrolmates had expatriated also, and joined in that case Scouts NZ while they were there. When they came back to Sweden, they brought scouting contacts with them. All part of the worldwide siblinghood of scouting. Your troop would be in an excellent position to earn the International Spirit Award! You would have an old scouting friend to visit, perhaps at an Ecuadorean camporee. You would have a much easier time planning cool high adventure in Ecuador with a local scouting friend to help. Lots of cool possibilities there!

I found my people! Now I can reach out to people in the area to talk about scouting instead of the Internet. I came here to connect with other scouters in the time that I have - the in between times and late nights. Now I can text people I know personally instead. I quite enjoyed WB, and would recommend. The brief format made it a great reminder of things I already knew, I learned a few new things, but above all I got plugged into engaged scouters nearby.

All, naturally, true, but I wanted to thank you @skeptic for causing me to read this particular section. Thinking of some recent conversations about acceptable cub squirreliness, I'm not crazy after all, and it's always good to know I'm not the only one who thinks simply meeting the sacred in nature develops spirituality 😃

Yes, yes, and yes, happening right now as we speak in the US and has been happening for literally over sixty years elsewhere. There is ample proof of concept here - this is a weak argument unless you have data showing that a large enough fraction of parents to cripple Scouting America as a whole refuse to send their children to youth activities that only have other children that are just like their child demographically. And even if you did, it's an argument pertaining to the goal of growing or maintaining Scouting America the organization as opposed to preparing youth to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law. And like DuctTape said, parents centering identity politics over a quality alternative learning program isn't really the fault of Scouting America. If the parents in your community can't stand doing things with people that aren't just like themselves in every way, then arguably they were never interested in scouting in the first place. We have always been a movement consisting of different "categories" of people - remember that Brownsea deliberately included scouts of different socioeconomic status. The current WOSM reference document The Essential Characteristics of Scouting starts with this BP quote that I'm sure you've heard before, in the context of Messengers of Peace if nothing else: The first paragraph reads Scouting isn't equally popular everywhere because our ideals aren't equally popular everywhere. But we don't compromise our values just because they're unpopular in some particular place. That's a key strength of our movement. The implied proposal you seem to be making is that while you agree that trans and cis kids are equally important and valuable, we should exclude the trans kids (and perhaps everyone else who isn't able-bodied, cishet, at least middle class, etc) anyway because the parents of the cis kids don't want their kids hanging out with trans kids. Is that correctly restated? Sorry to hear that your troop is having problems, but my unit has to my knowledge 100% straight cis kids and plenty of boys whose parents are happy to have them there, are happy to have them share a campsite with the girls, and wives of male leaders who don't have a problem with them going camping with us female leaders (and vice versa). (To be fair, I don't really care what their sexual orientation is and they're cubs so I could be wrong about that 100%, I'm not really seeking that information.) Heck, one of the probably straight cis boys who's having a hard time got a man to man emotional intelligence talk from one of the male leaders recently. We've had a good recruitment season and have now made up the losses we suffered after COVID. Are you sure that you're framing your unit's problems correctly in the first place?

The assumption is that boys and boy parents don't want to scout with girls. That's obviously not generally true (most scouting programs are fully coed, and I personally know boys and boy parents in Scouting America that want to scout with girls so it can't be the case that all the anti-girl scouts congregated in this NSO), so this claim needs quantification and justification to be taken seriously.

So, SO awkward though. And... doesn't feel true. The absolute vast majority of people are cis. Nobody - literally nobody - thinks that cis girls are boys, so how can they be boy scouts? The term is arguably unclear. I wasn't a boy scout as a youth. Any my male patrolmates weren't girl scouts. And we also weren't hermaphrodite scouts. We were all just scouts. What we were doing was way more important than what gender we were. Taking gender as the primary lens on life and then viewing scouting through it is a mistake. In a scouting context, make scouting the primary lens on life and leave gender to be one of many, many secondary characteristics of scouts. Gender is not the prism through which everything must be seen and understood.